The Game

by Ken Dryden

  Without the precious safety net I have carried under me all my life—(s)cholar- athlete, articulate athlete—without the athlete, what will I be?

  Where will I find the feelings I have come to need—the sense of common purpose, the spirit of doing something I believe in, the feeling of doing something right? What is good enough for me now? Like Eliza Doolittle, filled with new and omnivorous expectations, I wonder, “What is to become of me?”

  Until now, life for me has been one long continuum, and hockey has been its link. From age six to age thirty-one, I have shared the same passion and preoccupation; I have had the same pattern to my years. But that will now change. If it is true that a sports career pro-longs adolescence, it is also true that when that career ends, it deposits a player into premature middle age. For, while he was always older than he seemed, he is suddenly younger than he feels. He feels old.

  His illusions about himself, fuelled by a public life, sent soaring then crashing, have disappeared just as those of contemporaries have come to full bloom. He is left bitter, or jealous; or perhaps he just knows too much. It is a life that is lived in one-quarter time. “Boy wonder,” “(e)merging star,” “middle-age problem,” “aging veteran,” all in ten short years, and now in his thirties and still a young man, he feels too old to start again.

  As I think about next year, I feel myself slowly turning inward and away from the game. I feel that absorbing commitment I always felt only occasionally now. My highs are not so high, my lows no longer so depressingly low. It comes with age and a broadened perspective, but it is an emotional fudge. I don’t want to feel the same precarious swings any more. I want to feel comfortable and secure; I want to control what I do, and how I feel. I have become detached and incessantly analytical.

  From the referendum on Quebec’s independence to the “Son of Sam” (m)urders, I find almost everything “interesting,” and if pressed for more, I offer explanations. I show that I “understand” how such things happen, and I go no further. But as I hold back, giving less of myself, I find that I’m losing my enthusiasm for the game. In an athlete, it is not the legs that go first, it is the enthusiasm that drives the legs. I go to optional practices, I work as hard as I ever did, but my motivation is different: where once I felt joy, now I feel joy mixed with grim desperation. I will not get any better. I must fight to keep what I have.

  I have one goal left in hockey. Other people, sensing I might retire, have urged me to stay another year or more, to turn three (after this season perhaps four) consecutive Stanley Cups, Vézina Trophies, and first all-star teams into five or a record six. But there is achievement in having good seasons, and in not having bad. I just don’t want to be bad.

  I have always played hockey because I like to play, and true as that was when I was six years old, it is still true today. If I continue to play, it could only be for a different reason, and I won’t let myself play that way. Two weeks ago, we had a game in Vancouver. The night before, I talked with my sister Judy and her husband on the phone and told them something they had probably already sensed—that this would be my last year. The next night, after the game, we went out for a late dinner. After some unusually strained minutes, Judy said that she hadn’t enjoyed the game very much. She said that she couldn’t help feeling sad, watching, knowing that this was the last time she would see me play. I said nothing. On the verge of tears, I felt touched but embarrassed; I could no longer feel what she was feeling.

  I have not enjoyed this year very much, but it has been a necessary year. If I had retired a year ago, I would have left with doubts. I have none now.

  Early this fall, I met with Grundman and told him what I had told Pollock in June. He said that he was aware of our conversation, and suggested we meet periodically through the season so that he could be kept informed of any changes in my plans. A short time later, he called and we met in his office. He said that he understood my reasons for retiring, but wondered if my contract was a problem, and offered to discuss a revision to it. I was surprised at first and a little angry, for it seemed he hadn’t understood at all (then I realized he was only doing his general manager’s job). I told him that that was not the problem.

  He suggested we meet again later.

  He called again about a month ago, this time for a meeting that would include Courtois. Courtois said that he knew I was anxious to pursue another career, but wondered if some sort of special arrangement might be made that would allow me to continue to play. He made a suggestion: a slightly reduced game and practice schedule while working part-time as a lawyer with his law firm or in the legal department at Molson’s. It was the kind of hockey-law arrangement that had brought me to Montreal in the first place eight years before, but it came as a great shock to me. We talked of the problems it might create (including the initial one, the six-month bar exams I would need to take in Ottawa, more than one hundred miles away), and of how we would work them out. It seemed a wonderfully simple and obvious solution. I told them I would think about it, as they said they would, and we promised to meet again a few weeks later.

  I called the director of the bar course in Ottawa and asked him if he thought such an arrangement could work; he assured me he thought it could. For several days I thought about this combination that seemed to offer everything. But as the final meeting with Courtois and Grundman approached, I began to change my mind. It wouldn’t work. The team was already splitting apart from the success of three Stanley Cups—a fourth would make it one more year divided; a Stanley Cup defeat, and it would demand the kind of special commitment I could not give. And for me it would mean only more years dabbling at the edges of a law career, a part-timer in a full-timer’s game. But much worse, I would become a part-time goalie again. I had been one once, with the Voyageurs, but what was right for that time and that stage in my career would not be right for this. I would be available to the team only on my time, not on the team’s, giving it what I could give, not what it needed; giving up a goalie’s joy and satisfaction, his need to feel linked with, and in some way responsible for, the fortunes of his team. I have played only four or five fewer games this year than in other years, yet I feel like a hired hand, in for a few games, out for a few games, interchangeable, unimportant, and not playing the way I can. Next year, I would play less often and, as I would be unable to be around all the times I was needed, the team could only look to someone else.

  And as I thought about it, other things became clear. I realized that what had excited me most about the offer was the challenge of working two careers. It wasn’t to practice law. I had known for some time that I had little interest in that. Indeed, I was looking for an excuse. I knew that otherwise I would never allow myself to play another season, that I would taunt and abuse myself—too weak, too comfortable, too willing to put off a time I knew was coming if I tried. But if I practiced law while I played, maybe I would let myself go on. Just as the team was looking for a way, so was I. Then I realized something else. It came to me late last week as I sat alone in my office. Shocked and disappointed in myself, I realized that I didn’t want to play hockey either.

  After I had told Courtois and Grundman of my decision to retire, and after Courtois had replied, we sat silent a moment, all of us, I think, a little relieved.

  A few hours later, I drove home—my elbow in, my window closed, my radio silent. When I walked in the front door, Lynda rushed from the kitchen to meet me. She asked me what Courtois and Grundman had said. I told her. We exchanged glances.

  * * *

  TUESDAY

  “The conductor plays not a note, but he must be musician, teacher, charismatic healer, foreman, administrator, psychologist and public relations man, and he must do all these things superlatively well.”

  —Bernard Holland, The New York Times Montreal

  Lynda and Sarah are in the kitchen; Michael, aged one, plays with his trucks in the hall. I walk downstairs, saying “Good morning” over the banister to them and continue to the front door for the
newspaper.

  “Good morning, you guys,” I repeat affably, “did ya have a good sleep? Good, good,” I continue, not waiting for an answer. “Huh?

  Michael did?” suddenly hearing what Lynda has said. “You’re kidding.

  I didn’t hear you at all, Mikes. You okay now? Good, good.”

  Sarah and Michael run around the kitchen; Lynda is cleaning up.

  I drink my orange juice and read the paper. I start with the front page.

  “Mommy, Mommy,” Sarah screams triumphantly, “look what I can do,” and as we watch, she somersaults down the hallway outside the kitchen door. I turn to the sports section for the scores. “Mommy, come quick,” Sarah screams again, rushing into the kitchen.

  “Michael’s trying to climb on the dining-room table.”

  Lynda runs out behind her.

  Some minutes later, my juice finished, the paper read, I look up.

  “Well, what’re you guys up to today?” I ask, and while Sarah is telling me, I interrupt, and with a laugh, threaten, “Hey, I’m gonna get you guys.”

  Sarah and Michael run off screaming with delight and I chase them into the living room. Like a favorite uncle, I lift them up and twirl them around. We roll on the carpet laughing and screaming.

  Soon, Lynda calls them to get ready to go.

  “G’bye, Sari,” I call to her, “have a good time at Mrs. Swan’s [nurs-ery school].”

  “Daddy,” she says with a four-year-old’s exasperation, “I just told you, today I go to the library.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah,” I say weakly, “have a good time. You too, Michael. See you guys later.”

  I feel good; like yesterday, like Sunday night, but with a certain solemnity that wasn’t there before— this is my last season. But what pop in and out of mind, too often and too fast now, are thoughts of next year, and they unnerve me. I feel empty. Next year seemed a long way off until yesterday. Yesterday I only wanted not to play. Today I must think of what comes next. I have lived with this moment for many years, planned for it as others, thirty years older, plan for their retire-ments. Why don’t I feel better? What will I do?

  There are just three months to go. I know this is the time when I should dedicate myself to the rest of the season, to my last chance, but when I think of it, I feel no surge of commitment and I disappoint myself. Yet somewhere inside there is a quiet, penetrating feeling. It has nothing to do with “going out on top,” as others often remind me to do; that is their pleasure. I simply want to do it right; I want to do it in such a way that years from now, when I forget it had nothing to do with going out on top, I will feel no regret and others will feel none for me.

  There has always been next year, another chance to do and think and feel what today I had no time for. Suddenly there are so many things left to be done, so many unanswered questions, and so little time. What does Lapointe look like? How does a dressing room sound? How does it feel to make a save, to let in a goal, to hear the crowd? What does a game feel like? What about Lafleur, Robinson, Houle, Gainey? I want everything to stop. I want to remember.

  The next time I think of it—my last season—I say something to myself, too fleeting, too much in passing to be a vow, as I do in a game when the moment is right but I can’t quite feel it, just a quick “Okay, here we go”; and I embarrass myself when I do.

  Breakfast done, the paper read, it is mid-morning and my day is finally beginning. Today is a “practice day,” as yesterday was; tomorrow and the next day are “game days.” Today, we are “at home,” tomorrow we’ll be “on the road.” If someone were to ask me the day of the week, I would think for a moment and say it is Tuesday, though I wouldn’t be sure. And if they wanted to know more, I would tell them it is February, but I don’t know the date. I almost never know the date. And while sports life runs on time (and because it does, actually fifteen to thirty minutes ahead of time), I wear no watch. On “practice days” it is “before practice,” “practice,” or “after practice”; on “game days,” “before the

  [team] meal,” or “after the meal.” Occasionally, usually travelling to or from the West Coast, we have a day with no game or practice, a “travel day.” Less often, perhaps once a month, we have an “off-day,” a day at home. This is the “hockey season”; three months from now, six months ago, it was the “off season”—these are the seasons of our year. While others live by a calendar and a clock, we live by a schedule.

  For eight months in a year, our time is fragmented and turned upside-down. Awake half the night, asleep half the morning, with three hours until practice, then three hours until dinner; nighttime no different from daytime, weekends from weekdays. At home, in the rhythm of the road; on the road, needing to get home. Then home again, and wives, children, friends, lawyers, agents, eating, drinking, sleeping, competing in a kaleidoscopic time-sprint, for thirty-six hours, or thirty-eight or fifty-four—and we’re on the road again. It is a high-energy life lived in two- or three-hour bursts, and now, after eight years, I don’t know how to use more. I am not very good at off-days. Weekends, which I get only when injured, disorient me. I go to the store, make a few phone calls, take the kids to the park, and it is barely noon. I start on something that takes longer, and don’t finish; tomorrow and the next day and the next few weeks, I have no time.

  Always rebounding from one thing to the next, I’m always on the way to some place else; in contact with families, friends, and outside interests, but never quite attaching onto any of them.

  I will not retire “to spend more time with my family” (whenever Lynda reads that of an athlete or a politician, knowing better, she gets furious at the hypocrisy and self-promotion). But what I will enjoy is being around day-to-day while Sarah and Michael grow up.

  The house is quiet. I don’t like daytime solitude as I do the night.

  I wish the kids were here. I pick up the mail at the front door and go to my office. One letter is from the Ministère du Revenu du Québec, and I open it first. It is a notice stating that I owe a small additional amount on last year’s taxes. Below, it gives an explanation, in French, which I can only partly understand. Before I remember that this is a French-speaking province, I get upset.

  It is an uneasy place to live now. Soon—the newspapers speculate it will be in late spring or early summer—a question will be put to Quebeckers by referendum and the answer they give will affect Quebec and Canada profoundly. No one yet knows what the precise question will be, though most now know their answer, and in the next few months, with these hearts won, the minds of the undecided will be fought for, in a paper war of studies, polls, and editorials, and finally with the question, the one the Parti Québécois (PQ) hopes will deliver the right answer. A few days ago, both the PQ government and the Opposition Liberals released their referendum position papers—the PQ

  “D’égal à égal” and the Liberal “Choisir le Québec ET le Canada” —and for the time being, there’s a pause in the cycle of commentary, charge, and counter-charge that started three years ago. Yesterday, the front page of The Gazette told Montrealers that the price of beer is going up sixty-five cents a case. Today we learned that CTV has been enjoined from showing an interview with Margaret Trudeau until after her book, Beyond Reason, is published. Tomorrow or the next day, there will be a new study or a new poll, and referendum talk will take over again.

  On November 15, 1976, the people of Quebec gave the PQ a majority of seats in the one hundred and ten-member Quebec National Assembly. At a victory rally in Paul Sauvé Arena in the east end of Montreal, more than eight thousand “Péquistes” celebrated and welcomed their leader, René Lévesque, the new premier of Quebec. A few miles across town that same night, more than sixteen thousand people watched as the Montreal Canadiens beat the St.

  Louis Blues, 4-2.

  There was a different atmosphere in the Forum that night. It was as if the crowd was watching with vacant eyes, their minds committed somewhere else. A near miss, a save, a goal, the kind of event normally ant
icipated then climaxed with a loud Forum roar, brought a muted and delayed reaction, and sometimes nothing at all. At first, we tried to ignore it, but as the crowd’s distraction became our own, the game bogged down. Late in the first period, the message board flashed some early election returns—“Lib 8…PQ 7”—but there was little reaction.

  Some minutes later, at a stoppage of play in the second period, the message board flashed again, slowly, each letter bouncing from the right side of the board to the left, one space at a time, in French and in English, so that before the message was complete, the puck had dropped and the game had begun again. I glanced back and forth between the game and the message board, until the board finally flashed to a stop “— 15…Lib 9.” The rumble that had accom-panied the first movement of letters turned to a silence deep and disturbed. Something was happening, and we were all beginning to know it.

  Liberal supporters, too afraid to think of what that might be, sat silent; Péquistes, also silent, were too afraid to hope. Later in that period, there was one more message—“PQ 33…Lib 15.” This time, the crowd reacted, not in large numbers, but like fans in another team’s rink, with a loud and spirited roar.

  In the dressing room between periods, we sat quietly at first, then hoping and pretending that nothing was as serious as it seemed, and the one-liners began in earnest; nothing very funny, but we laughed long and hard.

  “Jean-Pierre Mahovlich, I’d like ya to meet Jacques Roberts.”

  “Hey Kenny, thanks for everything. It’s all yours now, Bunny.”

  In the middle of the third period, the message board flashed again—“Un Nouveau Gouvernement.” No longer afraid to hope, thousands stood up and cheered and the Forum organist played the PQ anthem. And when they stood and cheered, thousands of others who had always stood and cheered with them stayed seated and did not cheer. At that moment, people who had sat together for many years in the tight community of season-ticket holders learned something about each other that they had not known before. The last few minutes of the game were very difficult. The mood in the Forum had changed.